“My work is an investigation of ephemera and transformation of the everyday. I often use found materials that either reveal or subvert underlying formative principles. Whether I’m painting over newspapers, making installations from objects collected in the Arctic, intervening in public spaces, or inviting scientists to interact, I am driven by subtle shifts in perception and a rearrangement of form. I’m drawn to the fleeting experience that allows for impermanence, chance, unpredictability and tenuous stability. I’m looking for the possibility of revelation through simple means, a place and a moment where now. dissolves into always, and always into now.” – Jessica Houston : Artist Statement

Since 2006 I have been painting over newspapers adhered to wood panels – obliterating, whiting out, and rearranging the page. Working within the existing grid system to reveal and ultimately, undermine it, the act of painting echoes the ways in which the media selects, eliminates, and frames information. The paintings subvert and transform language, and create a new form made of line, mark, measure, and composition. In their multi-layered process of making these paintings become palimpsests, a place where chance and time collide. Alongside the trauma, beauty, and calamity of the everyday world, there is the possibility of silent observation. I also paint portraits of people from the newspaper. THis is largely a response to Susan Sontag’s ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’. I paint as a process of re-presenting the form, the information. In an era of information overload, painting offers a very different kind of response to the news, a human response, of the hand and the heart. – [Extract : J.H. Website]